Obama Awards Bayard Rustin -- the Man Behind the March -- the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Peter Dreier 

E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental College

Bayard Rustin reads the demands at the 1963 March on Washington

On Thursday, the White House announced that Bayard Rustin, the trailblazing civil rights activist, will be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

The timing couldn't be better. Rustin was a key advisor to Martin Luther King and the primary organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom -- a job he seemed to have prepared for all his life. Many Americans will be celebrating that event's 50th anniversary on August 28, and insisting that the country complete the march's unfinished business of economic justice, full employment, voting rights, and equal opportunity.


Honoring Rustin with the Medal of Freedom tells us something about how far America has come as a nation in the past 50 years. After all, he had four strikes against him. He was a pacifist, a radical, black and gay. Controversy surrounded him all his life.

Read the entire story at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/bayard-rustin-presidential-medal-of-freedom_b_3731304.html

The Big Six 1963

The Big Six

The leaders of the most prominent civil rights organizations of the 1960's. 

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee -SNCC, Negro American Labor Council -NALC, Urban League, Southern Christian Leadership Conference -SCLC, Congress of Racial Equality -CORE, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People -NAACP. 

   From l-r: John Lewis 23, Whitney Young 42, A. Philip Randolph 74,
Martin Luther King Jr. 34, James Farmer 43, and Roy Wilkins 62.

Gentle Warrior: A. Philip Randolph (1889 - 1979) | Communications Workers of America

The Communication Workers of America - CWA recognize A. Philip Randolph and his contributions to the American Labor and Civil Rights Movements.

"The words and deeds of A. Philip Randolph show us the unyielding strength of his life-long struggle for full human rights for the Blacks and all the disinherited of the nation. In his cry for freedom and justice, Mr. Randolph echoed the fury of all the enslaved. It is a fight for freedom with the kind of desperate strength that only deep wounds can call forth. With none of his words, however, does Mr. Randolph turn aside the help of others. From the day of his arrival in Harlem in 1911, Mr. Randolph was in the thick of the struggle for freedom for Black Americans."

Gentle Warrior: A. Philip Randolph (1889 - 1979) | Communications Workers of America